Bring on the Split

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In a culminating line-up of forks, big blockers will also be forking on August 1. What seemed like a done deal for Segwit, with both a strong majority agreement on Segwit2x, and then the very nuisance based UASF, we now also have ‘Bitcoin Cash’, which will be led by Bitcoin ABC, in a User Activated Hard Fork.

Bitcoin Cash is representative of Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin. It restores Bitcoin to its original roadmap, which follows that all transactions are done Peer to Peer, and on-chain. In addition to SPV wallets and 0-conf transactions, Bitcoin Cash will once again be a fast, scalable, congestion free scalable bitcoin system. Provided that ultimately Bitcoin Cash wins out economically in the longterm, it may very well just re-adopt the name “Bitcoin”.

It needs to be noted that “Bitcoin Cash” is 100% in line with Bitcoin’s 2009 Whitepaper.

A number of exchanges have already listed support for the latest fork announcement, as at the time of writing both Okex.com and Viabtc.com have expressed they will support and list the chain. The likely ticker for Bitcoin Cash will be BCC.

The news of this hard-fork shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

The community has been warring over this simple scalability increase for such a long time now that it truly is in the best interest of the community, and Bitcoin, that the two sides finally split. The community has been torn apart for a few years now, and the positions have been very vocal, and aggressive. Different communities are sticking with different forums, and Core supporting forums have been heavily censoring opposing views. It had to happen.

The Segwit2x ‘compromise’ is far too little, far too late for big blockers. Not to mention the level of distrust also. Segwit2x activates segwit some months before applying a double blocksize capacity increase. Many big blockers fear that the big blocks will never come, and that we may get a repeat of Core’s Hong Kong agreement which also promised both, but then dropped the blocksize increase component. Many believe that a true compromise, would have resulted in both camps getting their wishes activated simultaneously.

A 2MB blocksize is also considered incredibly too small moving forward. If the same effort will be required to fork again, then is it really worth it? Segwit also comes with a heavy blocksize that is full of witness data. This means that Segwit generates blocks at double the bandwidth cost. Ergo, Satoshi’s Bitcoin is far more economically sound.

Now in Satoshi’s words, the miners will choose:

“They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.”

It is for the best. It should have happened a while ago. Each side of the community can now work in their own silos, develop their own product, and finally allow Bitcoin to grow.

Eli Afram
@justicemate